Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  As I’ve pointed out before, the president can overcome opposition if he exercises his leadership as chief executive by getting people in and explaining exactly what he wants to do. Most of them - even if they’re in the opposition political party, or in the same party as the president but strongly opposed to some of his policies - will end up agreeing with him when he’s right. I’ve had that experience, but it takes leadership to get these things done, and I’ve tried very hard to be a leader when I felt something was important and right but faced a lot of opposition. I had tremendous opposition from the South, for example, with the racial sections of my Fair Deal program, in which, among other things, I proposed an end to the poll tax, and even though the war was over, the retention of the Fair Employment Practices Committee so that black people could continue to be protected and get their share of jobs. But despite that, I don’t think I’m being naive when I say that I don’t think that southern leaders were unmoved by what I tried to accomplish. I think that, underneath it all, they’re waiting for leadership to give them an out on which they can base a program for progress. And I’m very sure that they’ll do what’s right - what I pointed out was right - when the time comes.

  THERE WERE THREE other presidents alive during James Monroe’s two terms, which ran from 1817 to 1825: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Jefferson and John Adams both died on the same day, July 4, 1826, and Madison lived until 1836. I don’t think Monroe consulted the previous presidents at all. I can’t find any record that they were, and I suppose the answer is that Monroe just didn’t care to talk to them. That’s just my own opinion, but it seems logical.

  And there were five former presidents alive in 1860: Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. Van Buren and Tyler died in 1862, Buchanan died in 1868, Pierce in 1869, and old Millard Fillmore lasted until 1874. Here, at least, Lincoln had the good sense, as he had about most things, to try to use the knowledge and experience of these men in dealing with the situations that the country faced at that difficult time, and an effort was made to try to get the five men together. Four of them came to Washington, but Martin Van Buren wouldn’t come, nobody knows why, and the conference broke up.

  That brings me to the next important quality that a good president should have: the ability to continue and further the good programs of former presidents, and not try to abandon them simply because the previous president or presidents before that one, belonged to a different political party.

  Most presidents don’t seem to want to talk to former presidents. And from my own experience, I know that it’s pretty natural behavior. A new president wants to be president on his own hook and not have a former president around trying to give him advice. It’s customary for the president, after he’s elected, to want to run things himself. If he wants advisors, he usually wants to pick them out himself and then decide whether he wants to use their advice or not. And most of the people he picks are usually people who think along the same lines as he does.

  But that’s a mistake, and I tried very hard to avoid that mistake and worked constantly to get all the information I possibly could from people in whom I had confidence - whether we were in agreement or not on various things. Because of that, it was my privilege, and it definitely was a privilege, to ask the advice and get the help of a former president, Herbert Hoover, in the effort to keep people all around the world from starving. And he did a wonderful job of it. His own party had pretty much passed him up, of course. I don’t know whether they “disowned” him or not, as some people say. They always had him at every convention, but I don’t think they ever gave him any special consideration as a former president, or gave any thought to using his experience. He only had a chance with one Republican president after he went out of office, Eisenhower, and I know that one hasn’t given him much consideration.

  Well, if a new president comes in and decides to ignore all former presidents, that’s his own business I suppose, even though my personal opinion is that it’s shortsighted to do so. But the really terrible thing is when a president sets out actively to discredit the policies of the former president, and that’s what happened when I was succeeded by Dwight Eisenhower.

  Nobody had any reason to believe that Eisenhower, who’d been through the whole program with President Roosevelt and General Marshall and me, would attempt to do what he attempted to do. Well, he didn’t succeed, thank goodness. He finally had to approve many of the things established by Roosevelt and myself as far as the foreign policy of the United States was concerned, although we lost or alienated some of our foreign friends when Dulles became secretary of state, and a poor one, and Eisenhower didn’t work at his job. Anyway, they didn’t manage to reverse things back to the time of Harding.

  It was the same thing with Harding himself. Harding did, of course, succeed in reversing much of Wilson’s program when he came in. The policy of the people who followed Woodrow Wilson was to decide that everything that Wilson had done was wrong, and the action of Harding and the others was purely political, an effort to have political advantage. And temporarily they did get the political advantage, but it was ruinous to the country in the long run.

  We were coming out of isolationism into an entirely new period of international relations, and then along came Harding with his halfhearted statement that he’d support the League of Nations, followed by his abandonment of the organization. I don’t think the people elected Harding because they thought he was returning to isolationism; I don’t think they had any desire at all to return to isolationism. I think they elected Harding, as I’ve said earlier, because he coined that ridiculous word “normalcy,” and he promised he was going to return the country to a normal condition of ease and comfort and no pressure. People do get tired after a while of being told what they ought to do, and of somebody who not only makes them want to do it but actually do it, and then they vote for some fool and have four years or eight years of rest period in which to think about how wrong they were when they voted as they did. As if it’s ever possible to have ease and comfort without working for it, and without working at it!

  But Harding and his people were full of promises like that, and the result was a situation that finally developed into a wild speculative period and caused the Depression, and an isolationism that caused another world war. They’re to blame for all the youngsters killed in the Second World War, and I’ll continue to say that as long as I live.

  It took a president who understood the United States and the world, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to come along and start to get the country back on its feet again, and also to make Americans remember that we’re a world power and have to act like a world power.

  Every president has to revitalize the public spirit to some extent. Wilson’s great message to the American people was his Fourteen Points, a speech he made to Congress on January 8, 1918, and which he characterized as the only possible program for peace and an end to the World War. Among other things, he called for disarmament, the replacement of secret treaties by open treaties, freedom of the seas, the elimination of restrictive tariffs, and of course, “a general association of nations . . . for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike,” meaning the League of Nations. And Roosevelt’s opening message, when he was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, used exactly the same kind of direct, no-baloney approach to the problems we were facing at that time. (Incidentally, though not to get off the subject, this was the last time a president was inaugurated in March. After that, we were all put to work more quickly and began operating in January.)

  Roosevelt’s speech was, of course, the one in which he said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified fear which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. . . . Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable program if we face it wisely and courageously. It
can be accomplished in part by direct recruiting by the government itself, treating the task as we would treat the emergency of a war, but at the same time, through this employment, accomplishing greatly needed projects to stimulate and reorganize the use of our natural resources. . . . I shall ask Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet that crisis - broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power which would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.” Roosevelt said it in beautiful, inspiring language, but that’s the gist of it. He wanted to hit people where they lived, and everybody went to work. There isn’t any question about that. It’s an intangible thing, but it has to be brought to life every time it looks as though our principles and ideals and constructive attitudes are going out the window. And if it isn’t, why, then these things do go out the window, and we can have a dictatorship the way they did in Germany under Hitler.

  We also, of course, got the United Nations as a result of Roosevelt’s administration and mine, which is exactly what the League of Nations was supposed to be in the first place. I’m not saying that the United Nations is a perfect organization, or ever will be. It’s far from flawless, and it’s weak in many ways. But at least it’s a start.

  Whenever a president inaugurates a policy that’s worthwhile, the chances are that it will carry through sooner or later for the simple reason that we’re a two-party government, and there are people in both parties with the intelligence to see both sides of a question. And whenever a president inaugurates a policy that is truly for the welfare and the benefit of the country, and his successor comes along and tries to overturn it, there isn’t any likelihood that that successor president will succeed in burying it forever. We’ve had that illustrated very well in the two terms we’ve just gone through, so the practices of men like Harding and Eisenhower are not only bad for the country, but not really worth attempting.

  A good president is someone who can put aside political differences and try to carry forward the good programs of the past while simultaneously trying to introduce good new programs of his own. And if he can also manage to have a reasonably friendly relationship with Congress and a cabinet that will carry on the programs which the policies of his administration call for and also have the ability to turn over their functions, at the appropriate time, to their successors in a way so that the smooth functioning of the government can be carried on without any real interruption, then we’ve had a damn good president and a damn good government. You know what I mean. It’s important to keep the government running in an orderly way, just as you’d carry it on if a new president came in to a great corporation. That’s the idea. That’s all there is to it, though I’m not saying that it’s easy to do.

  And the final thing that is essential to being a good president is for him to have the full opportunity to accomplish the things he sets out to accomplish. That places me squarely on a soapbox, because I feel very strongly that the Twenty-second Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms, is a terrible amendment. When the people who wrote the Constitution were working on it, they arranged it so that it could be amended, and it’s been amended continually. But I think it’s only had two very bad amendments. The dumbest of these was the Eighteenth Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment, the worst thing that was ever attached to the Constitution, and it was finally repealed. And the other dumb one is that Twenty-second Amendment limiting the term of the president.

  My attitude isn’t the result of personal frustration because the amendment limiting presidential terms didn’t apply to me; the law was enacted to begin with the president who followed me. I could have run for the presidency as often as I wanted to run, including succeeding myself, as often as I felt like it. But I didn’t want to go back because I’d had enough and felt it was time for someone else. (I hoped, of course, that it would be Adlai Stevenson though it didn’t work out that way. Well, as I’ve said several times before in this book, and will undoubtedly say again, the country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get. And when they elect a man to the presidency who doesn’t take care of the job, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves. I know this is away from the subject of presidential terms, but I thought I should put it in.)

  It was Washington who established the custom of a two-term limit, but it didn’t happen because he felt that a president shouldn’t be allowed to serve longer than that; I think the general attitude was that a president should serve as long as he wanted to serve if he felt he still had things to accomplish, and if he could get people to keep reelecting him. As far as Washington was concerned personally, he decided in his first term that he wasn’t going to run again because he’d been attacked so severely by the press of his time, and Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton had to do a lot of persuading to get him to go ahead and run for a second term. But then, after he’d been through his second term, he just made up his mind that he wouldn’t take it anymore, and he quit, and that established the precedent. After that, it became a matter of custom for a president to be elected for two terms. And you’ll find that, with just two exceptions, the two Adamses, every one of the first line of presidents all the way up to the seventh president was elected a second time.

  John Adams wasn’t popular enough to win a second term, but Jefferson was elected to two terms, and so were Madison and Monroe. Then, like his father, John Quincy Adams didn’t make it a second time, either. Then Andrew Jackson was elected twice because he was a strong president, and after Jackson, we had a whole row of one-time presidents all the way up to the Civil War. It’s obvious from this that, in order to be reelected, a president has to carry out an administration that’s for the welfare and benefit of the country as a whole, not only in home affairs but in international affairs, and when he doesn’t do that, he doesn’t get reelected. So why worry about it?

  But there have always been people who felt that the length of time a president can serve should be regulated by law. There have also been those people who felt that a president should be limited to a single term, and that’s dead wrong. A single term is simply not enough most of the time, and if a president feels like working his head off for another term, he’s got a right to run for it. A single term is too brief for the simple reason that there are two Congresses in the one term of a president, and a president spends a lot of time getting acquainted with the members of those Congresses. And then, in an effort to get his program through, he usually runs for office again and tries to get his programs through in the next two sessions of Congress, which most of the time he’s successful in doing. As I’ve mentioned, there has really only been one president who got his program through in one term and then was able to consider things finished and pack up and go home, and that was James K. Polk, but most of us need two terms and sometimes more.

  It was necessary for Roosevelt to continue on account of the world war that was going on. The people themselves have to make up their minds when the time comes to elect and reelect a president, and they chose very wisely, in the case of Roosevelt, to elect him and reelect him three more times because he was needed. There are clearly times when two terms are needed, and times when more than two terms are both necessary and wise.

  I’ll tell you in plain language why the two-term amendment was passed. It was passed by a Republican Congress, the 80th Congress, a Congress with some particularly vicious members who wanted to discredit a president with the extraordinary achievement of serving and being elected to four terms. And it was ratified by the states while the people were still thinking about the wars they’d been through. But in my opinion, it was almost as bad a mistake as that absurd amendment that tried to legislate people out of drinking when they wanted to drink, and perhaps some sensible future administration and future Congress will repeal this one, too.

  I’VE WRITTEN QUITE a bit about various presidents in this book, and I’ll be saying some more later on. But I’m going to switch gears now and talk a little a
bout our country, the country each of those men ran for a while. And I’d like to begin by taking a look at the way the United States got started.

  Around the time of Columbus, there were an estimated 5 million people in the Western Hemisphere - 2 million on the North American continent and the rest in South America. Columbus didn’t get proper credit for what he’d done until long after he was dead, when his son wrote a book about him and described his accomplishments to the world. As every schoolchild knows, Columbus and all the other explorers thought they were going to India, which they were nowhere near, of course, and the discovery of the Western Hemisphere, which was then open and free, was a pure accident. No one at the time even realized how big it was. Accident or not, however, it was still quite an accomplishment.

  But another thing the book did was increase Europeans’ lust for gold, which was always very strong. They were all equally that way - British, French, and Spanish. They all thought, after the discovery of the Western Hemisphere by Columbus, that the right idea was to exploit that hemisphere and take everything and give nothing. And that’s exactly what happened, especially after the Spanish found immense quantities of gold in Mexico and Peru and took it all back to Spain.

  There’s no historical information in the records of Sweden, Norway, or Denmark of Viking exploration; what the Scandinavians have are sagas, verbal accounts passed down from generation to generation, which say that Norsemen came to the area that is now Rhode Island. That’s certainly possible, but the real exploration of our country, of course, didn’t start until after Columbus. And eventually the Atlantic Coast area was settled by the British and the Dutch, the Spanish came to the South, and the French settled in the eastern part of Canada and all through the Mississippi River valley. The Russians also got into the act: They came in on the northwest corner of the continent and settled in Alaska and had claims as far down as San Francisco.